A question I hear often when speaking about Social Networking and Web 2.0 is: if everybody else is doing it, is playing "me-too" the only thing left for me to do? That is a fair question, and in fact, many times embracing Web 2.0 superficially will only allow you to be at par with your competitors. However, when you grasp the notion that Web 2.0 is an approach, not a technology, you can do much better than that.

First of all, even though early entrants do benefit from garnering mindshare as innovative and bold, there are several cases of late entrants who were able to level the competition by offering a superior service. Both Google over Yahoo search and Facebook over MySpace come to mind, but there are several other notable examples.

So let’s suppose you’ve been late to the 2.0 game but now wants to try it out. What can you do to get an edge over your competitors? In other words, how can you obtain, in MBA lingo, a Sustainable Competitive Advantage (SCA)? A SCA happens when a firm "has value-creating processes and positions that cannot be duplicated or imitated by other firms that lead to the production of above normal rents" (Wikipedia). If you read the whole article (which is not that well written, by the way), you’ll find that, to be sustainable, your advantage has to be distinctive and proprietary.

Knowing that, three of your resources come to mind:

1. Your people (employees, business partners and customers)
2. Your data
3. Your products and services

People is the most overlooked of the three. Most companies claim things along the lines of "our customer always comes first", "our people is our most valuable asset" and "you can trust the excellence of our business partners". Talk is that cheap. Very few act on it.

Your employees

The executives in your company, individually speaking, may be among the brightest business people in the world. They’ve been through it all, seen it all, have powerful incentives to make your company do really well. But nobody really knows your business as much as the collective intelligence of all your employees. The teller in that remote city in Wisconsin knows that you just lost a loyal customer because you started charging too much for a cheque book, or because your company was rumoured to be exposed to a serious security breach. Your fast-food cashier knows that charging 50 cents for having a small salad instead of fries in your combo made 3 clients cancel their orders this week. That information can be trivial and inconsequent. Those employees may not even think about those things that much. If we want to be fancy, we can call all that tacit knowledge, which is typically deemed as hard to access. So, why bother?

Well, Web 2.0 is changing that. Knowledge that was only registered in people’s minds or oral conversations are increasingly becoming digitalized in blog posts, tweets, comments, text messages, VoIP conversations, call centre recordings, YouTube videos, you name it. Now, if the only channel your employees have to express themselves is the corporate email and the conversation at the cafeteria, you’re missing all that. The chart below shows that email and other traditional communication tools fall short in both reach and breadth of content. Using blogs, wikis and enterprise social networking tools can really amplify and strengthen the networks you develop at work, and will capture a fair amount of tacit knowledge that would otherwise be lost. You’ll also be able to reach out to the "invisible majority", people that you should care about and never have a chance to listen to (represented in white in the diagram below).

Many companies are afraid of giving employees an internal corporate blogging platform because that could be used as a space to vent frustration and rant about all sorts of things. Don’t be afraid. Rest assured that both venting and ranting WILL happen. And that’s a good thing for you, as you do want to learn what the major causes of dissatisfaction may be. Well, unless mistreating your employees IS part of your business model. But over time you’ll see that people complaining is not going to be the major theme there. Some folks will tell stories, others will share their knowledge or come up with new ideas. As the community matures, that may be even an added incentive for your employees to stick with your company, as the sense of belonging tends to be strengthened during this process.

Guidelines

Make sure you establish reasonable guidelines for what is OK, and revisit the guidelines from time to time to ensure they stay current and relevant. Also, don’t enforce guidelines as if you were the police. Do it as if you were a parent. People will occasionally post content that will challenge some of the guidelines. Unless it’s blatantly inappropriate, you may be better off leaving it there for a while, for the community to make a judgement. Sometimes breaking a guideline says more about the guideline than about the violator, and guidelines are supposed to evolve with the maturity of the blogging community.

Business partners

Some companies are also creating communities with their business partners, field agents or prosumers. Even though these folks are not part of your payroll, they want you to succeed, and listening to what they have to say can give you a perspective you cannot get from inside. More companies should be doing this in the next few years, opening their collaboration environment to trusted partners.

Customers

Finally, the scariest space of them all: let your customers say, in a public forum, what they think about you, your products and services. You actually should beg for people to comment on those. The more people do it, the less skewed your sample will be. Again, don’t be scared to give up control here. You’ve lost that years ago. If you are a large company or have a best seller product or service, try this simple test. Google your company’s name, and look for related Wikipedia or blog entries. You probably don’t need to go beyond the second page of results to find people speaking about you already. If you are really large, chances are that you’ll even find a <your-company-name>Sucks.com website.

So the bad news is that  the genie is out of the bottle already, you can’t control what people say anymore. The good news is that your competitor’s genie is also out there, so it’s a fair playing field for those who understand the game. I highly recommend you visit Mike Moran’s website for more on that (full disclosure: like me, he also works for IBM).

Done in the right way, this is a very hard capability for others to copy, as your people are truly unique and their contributions cannot be easily replicated.

Stay tuned as I’ll be addressing the other two resources - data and products + services - in a future post.

CBC in Canada has been an innovative user of Web 2.0 technology. One of their shows is now using wiki technology to help shape how they work. According to the blog Ingram 2.0 on the globeandmail.com,

“Spark, a show about technology and culture hosted by founding Definitely Not The Opera host/producer Nora Young, has launched not only a blog (something many shows have), but has taken the idea one step farther and has added a “wiki.”
…Ms. Young says that she hopes that listeners will use the Spark wiki…to offer thoughts about show topics, to contribute questions for guests who might be coming up on the program, and generally to interact with her and the rest of the show staff. The show is planning to do its entire show on February 6 using ideas generated by listeners. The show airs on CBC Radio One on Wednesdays at 11:30 am and on Saturdays at 4 pm.”

Well worth checking out.

Here’s an excerpt from the announcement of this year’s Enterprise 2.0 conference:

What if more conferences were like that? What if the discussion could begin even before the doors open?

When I talk about blogs or wikis, I often hear people’s concerns about sharing what they know. Will the sales guy take my work and give it away for free? Will someone else steal my thoughts and take credit for them? Will I get into trouble if I honestly tell people how I think things can be improved? Companies talk about the benefits of collaboration, but internal competition and individual instead of collaborative incentives show what the real story is.

One of the difficult things about introducing enterprise social computing is that culture plays such a large role. Here’s what Charles Jeter describes on his blog:

I think it depends a lot on the type of corporate structure; to be blunt about it a hostile work environment rewards innovative and individual thought destructively and can jeopardize someone’s position. Having a wiki, which tracks good ideas openly, may endanger those free-thinking people without them even realizing it.

Charles Jeter, CharlesJeter.com » How Wikipedia Works (Or Doesn’t) | Can Corporations Use Wikis?
via Stuart Mader, wikipatterns.com » Why I respectfully disagree with Charles Jeter

Corporate culture isn’t something you can change in a few months. You can’t install goodwill. You can’t enable cooperation. But your company believes that this is the way to go in the long run, how can you start changing its culture?

One way is to find and support networks of people who value collaboration, either by connecting people across the organization or by gradually hiring more people who believe in collaboration. A company can then help spread the lessons learned from those groups to the rest of the company. Stories are important in spreading cultural change. Through the stories that the company tells about the people it prizes, the company shows what it values. Here are some related books:

The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling: Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative by Stephen Denning Read more about this book…

Influencer: The Power to Change Anything by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, David Maxfield, Ron McMillan, Al Switzler Read more about this book…

This is by no means a quick or straight-forward process, but a collaborative culture must be in place –even if only in some pockets–for blogs and wikis to take root. Even then, some people will resist sharing. This is understandable. Reach out to all the people who want to share, and perhaps influence those who are ambivalent by showing them how they can personally benefit from these tools.

Mark Kuznicki comments on Robert Scoble’s video podcast on building a political [social media] starfish, and how all these social media pieces must work together:

To paraphrase Scoble, political campaigns have a really strong market signal to engage their audiences - they have 18 months to get to launch or close up shop.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch! - Robert Scoble’s social media starfish

Scoble’s “social media starfish” is a useful way to conceptualize the multi-headed and distributed network nature of effective social media engagement. Rather than just a shotgun list of tactics and platforms, it’s useful to think about how the different arms work together and facilitate engagement and convergence across media to influence audience behaviour and calls to action - in this case to donate, vote and volunteer.

One of the challenges we face is working with emerging markets for Enterprise 2.0. We aren’t working with a well-defined space, clear problems, and hard numbers on return on investment. Instead, there’s plenty of hype, unrealistic expectations, and disillusionment. But there’s also value, and I’m looking forward to helping more companies discover what they can do with these emerging ideas and technologies.

Here’s what Jevon MacDonald of firestoker.com suggested on his blog:

You can approach this problem 2 ways. The first is to offer a solution that solves a basic need across a host of industries. Jeff mentioned Echosign as a great example of this, their digital signature solution is growing steadily across a large customer base and they are potentially becoming a platform for other identity-based solutions. This is dramatically different from selling a suite of tools to a host of industries, it is focused on solving a specific problem using the 2.0 motif.

The second approach is to sell in to existing vertical markets. That means you are building an Enterprise 2.0 specific toolkit for an industry that needs it. In doing this your solution will have not offer just the same Social Bookmarking, Tagging, Blogs, and Wikis that you probably have, but you will need to offer vertical-specific features which string your Enterprise 2.0 tools together. In doing this there is also a potentially lucrative platform play in partnering with other E2.0 companies who want to sell in to your vertical market.

Jevon MacDonald, Enterprise 2.0: Where the f$#@ is my market? | socialwrite.com

To read more about creating markets, check out:

Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore Read more about this book…

Bruce Nussbaum at businessweek.com has a list of 10 Worst Innovation Mistakes to make whenever you get near or in a recession.

This is relevant to Web 2.0 and emerging technologies because these will be the ways companies innovate in 2008.

So what don’t you do? according to Nussbaum, you should not:

1) Fire talent. Because of America’s accounting laws, investments in talent are expensed, not capitalized, so cutting back on people, especially really smart, high-priced people, is a quick
way to cut costs. The accounting rules only hurt companies who follow them. Talent is the single most important variable in innovation.

2) Cut back on technology. Xerox and others report that companies are already curbing investments in technology to save money. Banks especially. The rise of social networking and consumer power means that companies have to be part of a larger conversation with their customers. This means big money spent on IT.

3) Reduce Risk. Innovation requires taking chances and dealing with failure. Recessions push managers to be more conservative. They need to fight this instinct.

4) Stop New Product Development. Saving money often means cutting back on new products and services during an economic downturn. This hurts companies when growth returns and they have fewer offerings in the marketplace to attract consumers.

The entire article is worth reading and considering. See NussbaumOnDesign 10 Worst Innovation Mistakes In A Recession. - BusinessWeek

For people who wonder, “why blog?”, the people at lifehack.org have listed
a number of strong reasons why you should in their article, How To Use Your Blog To Make 2008 Your Best Year Ever!

The article is written from a viewpoint of how to use a blog to improveyourself, and the bonuses they list regarding blogging (e.g. trackprogress, get feedback, share knowledge) apply to anyone, either personally or professionally.

When in Rome, do as the Romans do, as Obelix would have said. Since I’m in London, I decided to catch some live footy action on Saturday afternoon: Chelsea FC vs Tottenham Hotspurs at the Stamford Bridge. It was an entertaining game, even though Lampard, Drogba and Schevchenko were not playing. Other players more than made up for it: Joe Cole played really well, and Frenchman Nicolas Anelka almost scored in his first game for the blues.

The home team won 2 x 0, first goal by Brazilian Juliano Beletti and second one by Shaun Wright-Phillips, after a fantastic play by J. Cole. I wonder how many people in Brazil know that Beletti’s first name is Juliano - in Brazil, most players are known by a single name.

Here are some more pics (check the full set in Flickr):

And what would a football game have to do with Web 2.0, you must be asking? Well, two days ago I learned in the CBC Search Engine podcast that MyFootballClub, a British website, is offering anybody the opportunity to own and manage a real football club for £35 a year. It’s not an online game, or a fantasy league. The team is Ebbsfleet United and they aspire to reach Football League soon. According to their website:

For the first time in football history, fans have the opportunity to buy and then take control of a professional football club – both on and off the pitch. Every MyFootballClub member will have an equal say in team selection, player transfers and the running of the club.

This site takes the Monday morning chat about football to a whole new level. If you don’t like a player or want to fire the coach, you can really do something about it. I wish I had that power with Brazil’s national team or the Toronto Raptors. My oldest brother is a huge football fan and he goes to every game of our hometown team (the little known Ituano FC, if you really need to know), but the only voice he’s got is when he curses at the linesman during the games. Believe me, he makes the most from it: he and his friends know bad words in Portuguese that I can only imagine what they mean .

I’m not sure if this concept of wisdom of crowds applied to professional sports will ever work, but they are up to a good start, having more than 25,000 owners already. And I agree with this fella in the BBC website:

While I wouldn’t rule out a meteoric charge up the leagues to the
Premier League, I believe MyFootballClub’s success will hopefully be
judged on whether we’ve improved the club for its supporters and its
community. If that means we only get them one division higher,
or get them only a thousand more supporters a week, then to me that’s a
success.

Now I’m asking myself: Is there really anything in the world that cannot be web-two-oh-fied? In the last few months, I have heard about NGO 2.0, cyber crime 2.0 and even environment 2.0. Just google “<put any word here> 2.0″ and you will be amazed about how people have been trying to use the wisdom of crowds and the web as platform.

Chris Brogan blogs on topics relevant to Web 2.0 over at : [chrisbrogan.com].

In his latest blog posting, he is talking about how to introduce social media into your organization. Does this quote apply to you?

‘Companies are being pressured into the whole social media thing from lots of angles. They’re reading about it in mainstream press more often. Their PR agencies are asking them about it. Hell, PR agencies themselves are being pressured into getting into social media and social networking. But what does it mean? Where should one start?’

If this sounds like you, consider reading the series of postings he is coming out, including the first one on why you should

‘Separate Software from Motivations and Process’

You can find the blog post here: Five Starter Moves for Introducing Social Media Into Your Organization